Sightseeing in Prague

Prague, or Praha as the locals know it,
has been an important political, cultural and economic
center over the past 1,100 years.
The area was populated back in the Paleolithic age.
The Celts had a settlement here by 200 BC.
The first permanent settlement in today's Prague was a
simple fortress of wooden buildings, built by the year
800 AD where Prague Castle now overlooks the Vltava River.

Bohemia's dukes, later elevated to the status of
kings, were based in Prague.
It became the seat of a Roman Catholic bishop in 973,
well after the visits by the Macedonian missionary brothers
Cyril and Methodius.

Prague really prospered under the 1346-1378 reign of
Charles IV, the King of Bohemia and the
Holy Roman Emperor.
He directed the construction of a bridge and cathedral
that are major sights today.

King Wenceslaus IV, Charles' son, was not the
"Good King Wenceslas" of the Christmas song.
That one was Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia 907-935,
assassinated by his brother Boleslav the Cruel
and later considered a martyr and the patron saint
of the Czech nation.
No, Wenceslaus IV was nicknamed
"Wenceslaus the Idle" and was King of Bohemia 1378-1419.
He was recognized as King of Germany for a while,
then was deposed when he took an unpopular side in
one of the Papal schisms.
He managed to hold on to his position as King of Bohemia.
During his rule the Prague clergy announced that Jews had
descrated the Eucharistic wafer and encouraged mobs to
pillage and burn the large Jewish quarter.
Nearly all 3,000 members of Prague's Jewish population
were killed.

Jan Hus began presenting sermons attempting
to radically reform what he saw as a corrupt church.
So, he was summoned before the Council of Constance,
tried for heresy, and burned at the stake in 1415.

Defenestrations

The Defenestrations of Prague began soon after.
The First Defenestration of Prague happened on
30 July 1419.
The Hussite priest Jan Želivský
led his congregation through the streets
of Prague to the New Town Hall, where the town council
members were holding some Hussites prisoner.
Someone threw a rock from a window of the town hall at
Želivský and thereby enraged his mob.
They stormed the town hall and threw the judge, the
burgomaster, and thirteen members of the town council
out the window.
Those who weren't killed by the fall were killed by the
rest of the mob.
King Wenceslas IV, "The Idle", was said to have been so
troubled by this that the shock contributed to his death
by heart attack just over two weeks later.
The defenestration definitely led to the Hussite Wars,
which lasted until 1436.

The Second Defenestration of Prague led to the
Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, one of the most destructive
wars in European history.
Its cause was a complicated mix of Roman Catholic versus
Protestant conflict plus the impatience of assorted
heirs apparent and would-be usurpers.
On 23 May 1618, a Protestant group delivered a
grievance to the Catholic Lord Regents in the
Bohemian Chancellory of Prague Castle.
The Catholics wanted to consult with their superior,
the Protestants were impatient, and the Catholic Regents
and their secretary were thrown out the third floor window.
It was a 70 foot drop, but they landed in a large pile
of manure in a dry moat and survived.

Then there was the defenestration referred to as the
One-and-Halfth Defenestration of Prague.
It happened on 24 September 1483, between the more
prominent First and Second Defenestrations.
The municipal governments of the Old and New Towns
were violently overthrown.
The portreeve of the Old Town and seven of the aldermen
were thrown out the windows of their respective town halls.

A long time then passed without major defenestrations,
but on 10 March 1948 Jan Masaryk, the Czechoslovak Foreign
Minister, was found dead on the ground below the bathroom
window of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
This was officially ruled to be a suicide, but it
is believed that he was assassinated by either the Soviet
secret services or elements of his own government.
Confusingly, this is called the
Third Defenestration of Prague,
although if we count the One-and-Halfth Defenestration,
this would really be the
Fourth Defenestration of Prague.

Rudolf II was a later combined King of Bohemia
and Holy Roman Emperor 1576-1612.
He was rather obsessed with the occult, a devotée
of astrology and alchemy with a lifelong interest
in finding the Philosopher's Stone.

Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918 as the union of
Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Slovakia, and Ruthenia
after the First World War.
Prague was its capital.
Then, when Czechoslovakia was split into the Czech Republic
and the Slovak Republic, also known as Czechia and Slovakia,
Prague remained capital of its country.

Charles Bridge

Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia Charles IV
personally laid the first foundation stone for this bridge,
which came to be known as the Charles Bridge,
at 5:31 AM on 9 July 1357.
The royal astrologers and royal numerologists had
declared that the palindromic number 135797531
(as in 1357 9 VI 5:31) was an especially auspicious
time for initiating bridge construction.

And here we thought that we had to wait for
Rudolf II, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor
1576-1612, to find a strangely obsessed Czech leader.

There is a large arched tower at each end of the bridge.
A statue of Charles IV stands beside the east end.

My parents are crossing the Charles Bridge
across the Vltava River.
That's the Prague Castle and the Cathedral of Saint Vitus
in the background.

The Charles Bridge is filled with artists, vendors and
performers, it is one of the most obvious tourist
locations in Prague.

The arched tower at the west end of the
Charles Bridge leads into the twisting streets
below Prague Castle.

Saint Vitus Cathedral

The Cathedral of Saint Vitus
is the third church on this site within Prague Castle.
The first was founded by Wenceslaus I (the Good King
and not The Idle) in 925.
A larger basilica was built starting in 1060, and this Gothic
cathedral was started in 1344.

As for the 925 original,
Holy Roman Emperor Henry I had given Wenceslaus I a
holy relic: the hand of Saint Vitus.
There is also a theory that Wenceslaus thought it would
be easier to convert his people to Christianity if it
were based around a saint with a name very similar to that
of the Slavic sun deity Svantovit, the god of war,
fertility and abundance.

Vitus was from Sicily, believed to have been killed for his
belief under the Roman Emperor Diocletian around 303 AD.
A purely legendary description of the martyrdom of
Vitus, Modestus and Crescentia evolved during the 6th
and 7th centuries, based on other legends, especially
that of Poitus, with the addition of fantastic miracles.

According to this legend, Vitus was the son of a Roman
senator of Lucania — some versions have him just
seven years old at the time, others say twelve.
His father tortured him in an attempt to make him
renounce his faith.
Vitus fled this treatment with his tutor, Modestus,
and Modestus' wife, Crescentia, who was also Vitus'
nanny.
They fled to Lucania, then took Vitus to Rome so he
could exorcise a demon who had taken possession of
Emperor Diocletian's son.
As soon as he succeeded, Diocletian rather ungratiously
started torturing the three of them.
An angel miraculously transported them to Lucania,
where they died of their injuries.
Then three days later, Vitus appeared to a local older
woman and told her where to find the bodies so they
could be buried.

Vitus became a popular (if legendary) martyr quickly.
Pope Gelasius I, who held office 492-496,
mentions a shrine to Vitus in Rome.
Vitus is typically shown as Child Soup,
a young boy being boiled in a large pot.
According to the details of the legend, he was thrown
into a cauldron of boiling tar and molten lead
but miraculously was unscathed.
His fatal injuries were due to some other perhaps
less picturesque maltreatment.

Lead melts at 327.46 °C
and boils at 1749 °C.
While tar would boil at a much lower temperature, I would
assume that "boiling" is used metaphorically
within this legend.

Some bones labeled as the relics of Saint Vitus were brought
to the monastery of St-Denis, north of Paris, in 756.
They were given to the abbot of Corvey Abbey in
northwestern Germany in 836.
Interest in him spread through northern and eastern Germany
and beyond that into some of the Baltic nations.
A pattern of manic dancing in front of his statue
developed through German and Latvian land.
In 925, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor Henry I
gave the bones of one hand of Saint Vitus to Wenceslaus I.

The manic dancing on Saint Vitus' feast day evolved into
the dancing mania sometimes called
Saint Vitus' Dance.
This is now thought to be a mass psychogenic illness in which
groups of people, up to several thousand at a time, would
dance uncontrollably and bizarrely while screaming, singing,
and claiming to have visions or hallucinations.
This would continue until the people collapsed from exhaustion.
Or, as in an episode in 1278 in Germany,
until the bridge on which hundreds of them were dancing
collapsed into the River Meuse.

Andy Warhol
and Michael Caine both had severe rheumatic fevers as young
children and developed the symptoms of Sydenham's chorea.
Neither of them was boiled in tar and lead.

The first such outbreak appeared in the 7th century, and
they appeared across northwestern Europe until they
stopped abruptly around the 17th century.
One of the earliest described in detail was in the 1020s
in Bernburg and involved just 18 sufferers.
One in 1237 involved a large group of children jumping
and dancing all the way from Ernfurt to Arnstadt,
and may have been related to the legend of the Pied Piper.
In 1373 and 1374 major episodes were reported in England,
the Netherlands, and Germany.
Following years brought many more throughout Europe.

The Dancing Plague of 1518 was an episode in Strasbourg
that lasted at least a month in total.
Individuals would succomb to the mania and dance for up to
four to six days.
Some of them died from heart attack, stroke or simply
from exhaustion.
Local physicians helpfully ruled out astrological and
supernatural causes and blamed it on "hot blood".
But instead of bleeding the sufferers, probably to
further deaths, the local authorities set aside public
buildings for dancing space in the belief that the sufferers
simply had to get the dancing out of their systems.

It is now known that a common after-effect of acute
rheumatic fever can cause rapid and uncoordinated
jerking movements of the face, feet and hands.
This is now known as Sydenham's chorea for the physician
who first recorded his observation of the pattern.
However, this is almost entirely limited to children
and only very rarely is seen in adults.
Most victims of the European dancing mania were adults
(other than that Pied Piper incident).
There is some belief that ergotism might have been involved,
and some speculation about widespread occult practices,
but most historians consider the widespread dancing
mania to have been a form of mass hysteria.

The Gothic cathedral you see today was started in November
of 1344.
This was yet another project of Charles IV.
But after the first thirty to forty years of construction,
the cathedral remained only about half completed with
very little progress over the next nearly 600 years.
A "temporary" wall at the front of the transept marked
the limit of progress.

Construction was restarted in the 1800s, starting with
what was mostly repair work in 1861-1866.
The nave's foundations were finally laid in 1870.
Construction was finally completed in 1929!

The stained glass windows are amazing.

Some of the windows illuminate large mosaics.

The Chapel of Saint Wenceslas
contains the relics of Wenceslas, now a patron saint
of Czech rulers, plus the bones labeled as
belonging to Vitus.

The paintings of the life of Christ and the
semi-precious stones on the lower walls date to
the original decoration of the chapel in 1372-1373.
The paintings on the upper walls show the life
of Wenceslas, done in 1506-1509.

The Czech Crown Jewels are locked in the
Crown Chamber, accessed through this chapel.
The jewels are displayed to the public
every eight years or so.

Alphons Mucha's stained glass window
was my favorite part.
The Czech Art Nouveau painter created this in the 1920s.

It has an unusual Christ in Majesty at the top,
and the center third shows
Cyril and Methodius,
missionaries to the Slavic people and developers
(or at least populizers) of the script used to
write Slavic languages.

The center of the window shows the baptism of the
archetypal Slavic Man by the brothers
Cyril and Methodius.

Cyril and Methodius, originally
Κύριλλος
και
Μεθόδιος
in Greek, or
Кѷрилль
и
Меѳодїй
in the Old Church Slavonic script they had a hand
in developing,
were two brothers from Thessaloniki born in 826-827
and 815 AD, respectively.
They became Christian missionaries to the Slavic peoples of
southeastern and central Europe and in the process gave those
peoples a unifying alphabet and sense of shared culture.

Their mother may have been Slavic, and they grew up speaking
the Slavic language of the territory around Thessaloniki.

Lower on the window you can spot the archetypal
Slavic Women.

Cyril was well educated in theology and had learned Hebrew,
Arabic and Samaritan.
The Byzantine Empire sent him to the Abbasid Caliph
al-Mutawakkil in Baghdad to discuss the Christian concept
of the Holy Trinity with the Arab theologians.
This was hoped to improve relations between the Byzantine
Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate.

He was also sent to the Khazar Khaganate, a primarily
Turkic people who controled a large territory
north and east of the Black Sea.
Khazaria was a buffer state between the Christians and
Muslims, and its army incorporated Jews, Christians,
Muslims and Tengriists when western Europe and the shores of
the Mediterranean were routinely occupied with religious wars.
At times they were allies of the Byzantines.

The Khazar royalty and nobility converted to Judaism in
the early 800s.
Cyril was sent to Khazaria in hopes of stopping what the
Byzantines saw as a pernicious spread of Judaism,
but he was unsuccessful.

It is claimed that Methodius accompanied his brother
on his mission to Khazaria, but that is probably an
invention of a biographer writing long after the fact.

This picture depicts them meeting the Khan of Kazar.

In 862 Prince Rastislav of Great Moravia
asked the Byzantine Emperor Michael III and Photius the
Patriarch of Constantinople to send some missionaries
to his Slavic people.
He wasn't happy with what he was getting from the Roman
Catholic church, what with the associated pressure for
political control being bundled with religion.

The Emperor sent the two brothers, who started by training
some assistants and then by 863 were translating the Bible
into the language now known as
Old Church Slavonic.
They developed, or at least were the first to use and
popularize, the
Glagolithic alphabet.
They may have picked it up in the Crimea, where Cyril is
said to have seen a Gospel and Psalter written in a
script representing the local Rus' language.

The Cyrillic alphabet was developed from Glagolithic
soon after that, taking its name from one of the brothers.
Its development is attributed to Saint Clement of Ohrid,
a follower of Cyril and Methodius.
Not all of the resulting letters have lasted until today,
see the purple Cyrillic letters plus Ѧ in the table
below.

A few Cyrillic letters happen to look just like the equivalent
Greek and Roman letters:
А, Е, К, М, О and Т.

But I'm not complaining!
Cyrillic is far more logical than Greek,
which where there seems to be at least ten ways to
form the sound represented by Cyrillic И,
and where pronunciation depends on dipthongs and
special cases all over the place.

The German clergy in Moravia, however, did complain.
Not because of orthography, but because of a loss of
political power.
The Archbishop of Salzburg claimed ecclesiastical control
of the territory and was insisting that it should use
nothing but the Latin liturgy.

Pope Nicholas I invited the brothers to Rome in 867.
The Pope actually took the side of the brothers
and authorized the use of a Slavic liturgy.
This meant that the people could actually understand
their church services, something not possible outside
the Byzantine east.

But of course this did not last.
Latin was forcibly "restored" to people who never understood
it in the first place, and the Germanic ecclesiastical
structure gained control.
The
Great Schism of 1054
later ended any remaining ecumenical cooperation.

Staré Město and the Old Town Square

Staré Město,
the Old Town of Prague (literally the
Old Place), dates back to the 10th century
and contains a wide mix of architecture.

The Grand Hotel is one of many examples of Art Nouveau
architecture, from the same period as the Mucha window
in the cathedral.

Staromeěstské Náměstí
or the Old Town Square was the principal marketplace
in Prague until the early 1900s.

The elaborate clock on the Old Town Hall tower was built
in 1490 by the clockmaker Master Hanuš.
The legend you hear is that he was blinded immediately after
so he could not build a similar one for any other city,
and in revenge he crawled up into the clock and disabled it.

But historic documents show that he carried on
his clockmaking work unblinded for many years.
And he may not have been all that hot as a clock maker,
because this example didn't work until someone else
repaired it about 80 years later around 1570.

It puts on an elaborate mechanical show on the hour.
However, no defenestrations are regularly scheduled.